When someone dies

I've spent much of this past week thinking about my friend John Dauns, and what his death means. And I've come to the conclusion that we grieve when someone dies because a part of our own life dies, too.

I'm now at an age at which my parents' generation is gradually being extinguished. There is no one left on my father's side, and In this past year, we lost an aunt and an uncle on my mom's side. As each of these elders dies, I lose a connection to the people who always have been the ``real'' adults in my life. I have no knowledge of them as anything but adults, and they are the few who can remember me as a child. They are the ones who were all-knowing and all-powerful, the tall beings on whom I initially modeled my speech and behavior. They're the ones who knew the stories about what we called ``the olden days'' in our family's history. Now there's no one left to fill in the blanks but me.

In recent years, some of my age peers have died, too. Now, whenever I get the alumnae newsletter from the convent school I attended, I look first at the obituaries, and increasingly, there's someone from my class who is listed there. These are member of my age cohort, who had those same experiences of growing up female and Catholic in 1950s America in the Pacific Northwest.  They're the ones who, like me, think movies should cost 20 cents, Popsicles a nickel, and who can remember struggling with our first pairs of nylon stockings years before pantyhose were invented. They can probably remember dancing a peculiar dance called the ``camel walk,'' lusting for plaid Pendleton wool skirts with stitched-down pleats, and trying to sleep on those torture devices known as ``brush rollers.'' We had a shared vocabulary, a kind of verbal DNA that marked us as women who came from a particular set of roots. And what will I do when there is no one left who can speak that language with me?

And then there's losing those with whom we've had intimate relationships, the people whose hands we held, with whom we danced cheek-to-cheek, in front of whom we terrifyingly took off our clothes for the first time, with whom we deliciously shared a shower or a daring naked stroll in a mountain meadow.  They're the ones with whom we had those long lazy horizontal conversations on a Saturday morning while listening to the opera on the radio, the curves of whose cheekbones and hips our fingers memorized. Intimacy with them finally felt like a pair of old comfortable loafers, molded to our feet so perfectly that we could slip right into them in the darkness with no confusion.

I suppose at my age, that someone who falls into this latter category is unlikely to show up in my life again. Actuarial tables being what they are, I will be part of a growing sisterhood who has survived the men in our lives. Waking to and walking toward that possibility is hard. I think most of all it's hard because it means never again embracing the degree of vulnerability that is so central to that kind of intimacy.

It's funny, but a phrase from one of the psalms has been running through my head all week. (Yes, this Pagan knows her way around the Bible and can appreciate it as literature). It's ``Harden not your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert.'' I'm sure the psalmist's intention was other than what I read into that phrase.  Whenever I hear it, I think of the big lump of obsidian on Gianinni Piaza, outside the Bank of America building in San Francisco. It's called ``Transcendence,'' and was made by Japan's Masayuki Nagara, who calls himself the ``Samurai Sculptor.'' But everyone in San Francisco calls it ``the Banker's Heart'' and it's always personified for me that phrase about hardened hearts.

There have been moments in my life when it literally felt like my heart was breaking. Probably the day I was sitting on the kitchen floor, re-setting the tile and received the awful phone call telling me my eldest child had fallen off a mountain to his death was the worst one. Another came when I stood in a room in Davies Medical Center, looking down at my husband's AIDS-ravaged body after he died, knowing that once I left that room, I would never see his dear face again. And I think another came last week, when I got the email telling me that John had died, and all I could think of was how hard his life had been in the post-Katrina years, and how little I was able to do to ameliorate the difficulties in any way.

The trick, the task, the job, the existential dilemma that lies ahead is how to proceed when one's heart feels tattered and torn. And it is to know that hardening one's heart into that cold black lump of obsidian is not the solution.

So what have I done the past week? I've been here, by myself, thinking, writing, making occasional trips outside to pour compost tea over the plants in the garden. For the most part, I've not answered the phone or replied to anything but work-related email. I've just not wanted to talk to other people, to have to explain or tell the story, or try to respond to their efforts to be of consolation.  I've gotten perilously close to obsidian territory, but something always pulls me back. 

As usual, it's my garden: the lavender and jasmine fragrances that twine around my nose, the buds on the Cecile Brunner rose that are about to explode, the brilliant color contrast of cobalt lobelia trailing from a pot of marigolds. It's my last, best, and sometimes my only hope: going out into the garden and sitting a while with Persephone. She throws me a green and blooming lifeline every year at the vernal equinox and I hang on for all it's worth, more this year than most, it seems. The garden says life. the here and now, and speaks of possiblities and future and growth. It's an upraised middle finger to death, loss and despair.  And so I go into the garden once more and let it lift my heavy heart.

Comments

[Philip]

Victoria,
As I got to the end of your post, I thought about the compost and the beautiful flowers in your garden. From death comes life.
God bless,
philip

[terry grant]

Victoria, this is so beautiful it breaks my heart. This is the place our generation has come to. Who knew it would be so hard?

[Hollyheartfree]

VS-F, The ways of the crone are open to you. The garden ebbs and flows. Like life. To breathe in the scent of the Cecile Brunner you also take in the molecules of the dead that make the soil so rich. Hugs to you.

[Oregon Bell]

Thank you sister for your writing. For bringing the story full circle. I am sorry for your sorrow. And grateful for your eloquence, that when we wear the cloak of crone, carrying a memory is part of the passage.